The first and most obvious is an update to the dashboard look and feel. We’ve evolved the palette and increased the element / font size to generally make the dashboard cleaner and easier to read.

2. Updated ‘create assignment’ flow

The second major update is a rethink of our ‘Create assignment’ flow. Following feedback from the estimable folks at Foolproof, we’ve implemented a simpler flow that reduces the ‘cognitive overhead’ – in other words, makes people think less – when setting up an assignment. We’ve designed the assignment setup path to be much more linear and with more intuitive steps.

When designing a diary study to do ux research, user research or customer experience research, it is handy to have the ACEO model in mind as a guide.

ACEO stands for:

• Activity - what are people doing?
• Context - what is the context of their experience?
• Emotion - what is the emotional impact?
• Outcome - what is the result of the experience on the user/customer?

These are the four main elements of any individual experience. Structuring your exploration along these lines of enquiry will help you fully understand what is happening and why.

Let’s look at these in a bit more detail:

Activity

Quite simply what are people doing or trying to do relating to your product or service at that moment in time? This is an easy task to start with and will form the basis for the rest of your enquiry.

Context

What is happening at the time that might add a different meaning or interpretation to what people are doing? For example, what is their goal at that particular point? What frame of mind are they in? What other external factors are colouring their experience?

Emotion

Daniel Kahneman tells us that emotional peaks are the things that stick with us most, that make an experience a memorable experience.

So we need to ask: what emotions are people feeling? How strong are these and what is driving them?

Outcome

Which leads us to our final element: outcome. We are not interested in user experiences out of idle curiosity – we need to know from a business perspective what this experience adds up to – either on its own and together with other experiences.

Only by tracking the outcome can we work out whether the experience was effective against any given goal and if and how it could be optimised.

Here we need to ask: what did people do next? Was this as a result of the experience? What was the influence of this experience on perceptions of the product / service / brand?

Summary

So there you have the ACEO model: Activity - Context - Emotion - Outcome, a four point framework for structuring your experience research diary studies.

This is an excerpt from nativeye’s Mobile Diary Bootcamp. If you’d like the whole thing in 6 handy emails just follow the link to sign up. It’s completely free!

Understanding the customer experience has never been so important – or so challenging

Customer experience is today’s competitive battleground – designing a great experience makes the difference between business success and failure. But in order to design it, we first need to understand it – uncovering the needs, behaviours and contexts that shape any given experience.

The explosion of channels and touchpoints has made this task that bit harder, vastly increasing the number of possible journeys and experiences. Our job now is to piece together these fragments into one comprehensive story.

However, with the problem comes the cure. Mobile diaries are the coming together of traditional diary research and smartphone technology. Together they allow you to pull together a picture of people’s experience – without you having to leave the office.

Mobile diaries are a great way to address this challenge

Diary studies are a way of researching people in their natural environment – no need for artificial conference rooms or usability labs. They also help overcome recall issues – participants are asked to record things as they go rather than recall individual experiences days, even weeks after they happen.

Mobile technology amplifies this, making the data collection process easier, the geographic reach wider and the costs lower. Plus people carry their mobile phones with them everywhere, giving researchers the opportunity to get closer than ever to the point of experience.

Sign up for Mobile Diary Bootcamp

Mobile Diary Bootcamp will teach you how to run a successful diary study from end to end.

What you’ll learn:

- when to use mobile diaries
- how to design your study (2 parts)
- how to recruit and manage participants
- how to effectively analyse your data
- running mobile diaries with other research techniques

Anyone who has tried to get traction for an innovation – whether startup or internal initiative – will recognise the challenge. You have a view of a better future for your customers, if only you can convince them. Sticking doggedly to your grand vision on the one hand may not bring along enough people to achieve market success, while being too customer-centric limits your potential and fail to deliver the game-changer.

The trick of course if navigating a third way of market-driven innovation that meets people’s unarticulated and unmet needs – giving them the thing they didn’t even know they wanted but from which there’s no going back.

The following are some personal experiences from the last 3 years of launching and growing a mobile research platform – a tool that seeks to transform the market research industry. The examples are specific but hopefully the lessons are relevant to anyone trying to get their innovation off the ground.

Mobile – the next frontier in market research

When asked at the recent Insight Innovation Exchange in Amsterdam when the time of mobile market research is coming, Ray Pointer of Vision Critical replied, “About 18 months ago”.

This anecdote gives you some insight as to a market that has been hotly tipped for a while now but is still waiting to catch fire. (that said Survey Monkey recently reported that they had seen x14 increase in their mobile traffic in the last 3 years).

The case for mobile is various but includes: massive smartphone penetration and usage, an intimate and ‘in the moment’ channel, the richer data made possible by smartphones’ communication, multimedia and location functions. This all adds up to a new way of engaging and learning from customers. At nativeye we talk about doing research that doesn’t feel like research.

Predicting real need is hard but vital

Prior to coding a single line we put together a clickable prototype and received strong encouragement to proceed. However those nodding heads we had initially were not necessarily our first customers. In fact, some are only starting to buy now, 3 years on. Possibly there was more we could have done to validate need, but there are a whole host of other factors beyond your control that dictate when people are ready to buy.

A clue to validating real current need is to look at whether people are already trying to solve the problem right now. They might be using other products, hiring people or inventing workarounds to try and do the thing that your product does.

Find your tribe

Some people resist just change (including new technology). This is certainly the case in the market research industry. Either because it requires effort to learn new techniques or because people feel threatened by it (which is probably justified if you are an Amazon warehouse picker). David A. Aaker advises innovators to ‘beware the pessimist’ that will attempt to derail innovation projects based solely of their irrational fear of the new (interesting to note that he also mentions to be aware of the over-optimist).

Some people you’re just not going to win over. The best you can hope for is to quickly identify them and move on. For others to try something new the Benefit must > Pain. Pain comes in many forms – the mental effort to work out where your product fits, the risk of an untried approach, bugs in a new product.

However, some people are much more inclined to give something new a whirl – the benefit to them being the potential transformation of their day-to-day. These people are like gold and will be your champions. I think Seth Godin provides the best advice here which is, “find your tribe and grow out from there.”

Learn to explain innovations in terms people currently understand

Of those that do embrace technology, many initially consider it in old frames of reference. Initially nativeye was seen as a mobile survey tool. Common questions included, “How will I get all the survey questions I want on a screen that size?” This made our spirit sink somewhat as we didn’t see nativeye this way – we saw it as a two-way customer channel that captured people’s experience in unprecedented richness and timeliness.

It’s sometimes frustrating when trying to push things forward only to be pulled back into old frames. But if your product is truly transformational and you can get people to try you out, then this should bubble to the surface and they will tell others of their great experience. In the MR world a tool has to deliver on old measures such as ‘response rate’ before people will countenance the new stuff. It’s a reality that you have to navigate this while still not losing track of the larger potential.

Don’t sell features, solve jobs

Clay Christensen talks about innovating by solving the jobs people want to do. Selling in these terms also makes your proposition much more compelling whereas only talking about features leads you to sell yourself short. This is why about 18 months in we started selling “relevance”. This is the bigger benefit that helps bring people on board by speaking language they can understand. As a customer, I don’t know if I want a ‘mobile research platform’ or to ‘open up a channel to my customers’ but I certainly want my brand to stay relevant to its customers.

Ben Claxton is the founder of nativeye, a mobile research platform that helps your business stay relevant. http://nativeye.com/

Proving once again that everything comes back around, BBC4′s series The Fabric of Britain threw up a nice little historical parallel to modern trends in tech design.

Back in early Victorian-era Britain, design powers-that-be were concerned about wallpaper and its unedifying effects on the British public. Considering the naturalistic and trompe l’oeil images of the day to be troubling, Parliament appointed Gothic-revivalist Augustus Pugin to spearhead a re-introduction of flat patterns, more suitable to walled surfaces, and more befitting of a household of the Empire.

This post aims to cover the basics for conducting successful mobile research with nativeye (links to more advanced topics will be added in due course).

So let’s get started. First up, what to research?

WHAT TO RESEARCH?

Mobile research is a flexible tool – it’s ideally suited to capturing data in the moment or immediately following an experience. The nativeye app will also work offline, so people can truly post whenever, wherever they are.

You can use nativeye for a variety of research. Here are some examples:

Ethnography – ask people to report back on their daily lives and activities

Customer journey and experience mapping – ask people to record their experiences of a particular brand or category

Feedback in the moment (e.g. at events)

Crowdsourcing ideas

Co-creation projects: set people a creative challenge, as a group or individually

WHICH RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES?

Here are some examples:

Mobile diary studies (ask people to post every time they do, think or experience something relevant to your study)

When designing mobile research studies, the best thing to start with is the “mobile” aspect. This means that you should think about when and where you’d like people to post and what you want them to tell you. It also means that you should think about how much time people have to post when they are out and about (less is sometimes more!).

Some pro tips:

Use as few tasks as possible to capture the data you need (short and sweet works best on mobile and “answer many” assignments)

Always include a Photo task (this brings a post to life and helps you ‘see what your participants see’

Use a mix ‘open tasks’ like Open text and prompted tasks (like Multi-choice and Slider)

Balance the number of required and optional tasks (only make tasks required if you absolutely need that data)

Use the Comments feature to delve deeper into what people post

Use “Group assignments” if you want to encourage group discussion

TIPS TO INCREASE YOUR RESPONSE RATE

Make sure you invite people in good time. Ensure your participants are set up on the app in advance of your project start. Use the Overview page to check their progress. You can use the “Re-invite” button in the Edit Assignment > Invite tab to help get people started.

Use the Prompt feature on the Overview page to remind people to keep posting

Use nativeye Social Features to like and comment on participants’ posts – we all like to be acknowledged for our efforts, giving participants feedback will keep them engaged in your project

Some choice quotes from this great article by Erica Hall in Wired on why the ‘fail fast’ startup culture can actually just be an excuse for avoiding doing any research – which hell, i don’t know, might actually help your business succeed.

At the heart of this is being the most informed you can be. Not to restrict your imagination to what customers tell you what they want, but to make sure you are able to “design and build for the real world”. In other words, direct your imagination in the right direction.

“a common concern and excuse for not doing research is that it will limit creative possibilities to only those articulated by the target users, leaving designers devising a faster horse (lame) rather than a flying car (rad).

Worse than being limited by potential customers’ imaginations is being limited by one’s own — especially if most business leaders admit they’re not going to be the next Steve Jobs. But why should they have to imagine how the world works, when it’s possible to find out through research? Their imagination is then better spent on designing the solution.”

As an entrepreneur one of the hardest challenges is to really ask yourself “am I designing a solution for a real problem?”. Ideas are temptresses, especially if they are your own. But doing everything you can to validate your idea before you embark on a long and choppy journey of development is doing yourself a massive favour. And this again is where research can help.

Clay Christensen asks whether understanding our customers actually helps us innovate? Knowing about the characteristics of people may only help you get to a correlation between people and the things they buy. Whereas understanding the job they need to do gets you closer to the causation of why people buy something or not.

Understanding the job people need to do (e.g. furnish their home in a day, keep busy on a dull commute) helps companies understand which dimensions of their product/service they should be innovating on. It’s pointless spending time innovating on a dimension that makes no difference to whether people actually buy or not.

This understanding also helps you know what your competitive set really is (it might not just be made up of direct competitors with the same product as yours).

Clay illustrates this in characteristic dry fashion in the first 15 mins of this Boxworks keynote (whole thing worth a watch if you have time).